God’s Teeter Totter Sunday, 4/5/15 (Matthew 28:1-10; Luke 24:36-49)
1 Growing up in the sixties and seventies, I remember going to the Turner Halle
playground in New Ulm and playing on the teeter totters. They weren’t fancy teeter totters
like the one in this picture, they were basically long wooden boards painted green with little
metal handles to hold onto, with the boards mounted over a rusty frame of metal pipe. Those
were the days when our parents didn’t realize that teeter totters were deadly dangerous. Of
course, we kids DID know that, which is exactly why we found them so much fun. The
wood slivers weren’t fun, but playing tricks on the person on the other end of the teeter totter
was endlessly amusing. There were basically two variations of teeter totter pranks that we
played on each other. In the first game, an extra friend or sibling jumped onto one end,
suspending the other person up in the air with no way to get down. The second game was
more dangerous, and involved jumping off the teeter totter when the other person was at the
highest point possible, thereby sending them crashing to the ground with the full force of
gravity’s punishment. The days of the dangerous teeter totter are gone now, but a small
remnant of people remain who remember the stories. Are you one of them? Raise your hand
if you played on one of those old style wooden teeter totters.
2 We didn’t know it at the time, but those teeter totters were actually simple machines.
They were levers, composed of beams (that is, the boards) and fulcrums (that is, the metal
pipes that the boards flipped back and forth on). The amazing thing about the teeter totter is
that the lever allows you to find a balance point so that with very little effort you can lift the
other person up off the ground, even if they weigh more than you do. If you’ve been on a
teeter totter, then you know that you can mess with that balance by either adding more
weight to one side of the beam, by moving where you sit on the beam, or by moving where
the fulcrum sits under the beam.
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3 The same principle that makes the teeter-totter work so well also makes the lever a
useful machine for accomplishing work. If the beam is long enough, and the fulcrum is
moved to one end of the beam, it’s possible to move something very heavy with just a small
amount of force applied to the other end of the beam. That’s what’s meant by the term
“mechanical advantage.” By using the simple machine of the lever, it’s possible to do things
that would be impossible for us without a lever. It’s part of what allows us to carry heavy
things in a wheelbarrow, for example. The handle of the wheelbarrow is the beam of the
lever, and the wheel is the fulcrum.
Archimedes, a third century BC Greek mathematician, famously wrote "Give me a
place to stand, and I shall move the Earth with a lever.” That was true in principle, although
someone has since calculated that the lever would have had to be so long that Archimedes
would have been standing about 9 million light years away in order to move the earth with a
lever. But what was impossible for Archimedes, was possible for God. And God DID move
the earth. The beam of God’s lever was Jesus Christ, and the fulcrum, his resurrection. No
other event in time since the creation and fall has been so impactful, when we inherited the
sin of Adam and Eve and God decreed that all people must die. No other event WILL BE as
impactful as the resurrection of Jesus until the RETURN of Jesus Christ to give US our
resurrection bodies before the final judgment.
4 So what’s the big deal about the resurrection of Jesus? Why is it such a powerful
lever? In my first year of seminary, one of my professors, attempting to deconstruct our faith
and then rebuild it, asked how many of us would renounce our Christian faith if
archeologists managed to demonstrate conclusively that they had discovered the bones of
Jesus in an ancient tomb. About a third of the class raised their hands, while the rest
stubbornly refused to abandon their faith. With a smirk on his face he called the holdouts
heretics, then he went on to illustrate just how much rides on the belief in the bodily
resurrection of Jesus. That is, in the belief that Jesus did NOT in fact leave his bones behind.
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It’s fashionable these days to try to explain away or dismiss all the parts of the Bible
that we don’t understand or believe. Increasingly, it’s common for people to believe that
they will be raised spiritually but not bodily. That is actually a very ancient heresy, and yet
for some paradoxical reason in our modern materialistic culture we seem to be in a hurry to
consign our bodies to the grave and only our souls to eternity. And yet that’s not at all what
Jesus did, and it’s not at all what the Bible says we will do.
5 The empty tomb on Easter morning was a big deal because Jesus did what no one
else had ever done. God the Father raised him from the dead and gave him a new body. In
most of the accounts we have of Jesus appearing to the disciples after the resurrection, like
the one this morning in Luke 24, Jesus makes a point of showing them that’s he’s not simply
a ghost or a spirit; He shows them his nail scars, he eats with them. He lets Thomas put his
hands in the wound in his side.
But the resurrection is also a big deal because in reversing the curse of death, Jesus
made it possible for us also to receive resurrection bodies. Jesus died so that we can be
forgiven and reconciled with God, but he rose again so that WE can rise again. As the
Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome: “For if we have been united with him in a death
like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” And similarly, “If
the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from
the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. ”Does
that surprise you?
We don’t do much with the ancient Christian creeds anymore, to our great loss, so
today we’re going to say the Nicene Creed together. It was written more than a thousand
years before the protestant church separated from the Catholic Church. When we say the
word “catholic” in this creed, we’re not referring to the Roman Catholic Church, but to the
church of Jesus Christ wherever and whenever it expresses itself.
These are the beliefs that the early church held to be central to Christianity. These are
the beliefs that STILL are the most central to Christianity. Bodily resurrection is one of those
beliefs.
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6 Let’s read together now the Nicene Creed as you see it on the overhead screen.
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all
that is, seen and unseen.
7 We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the
Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
8 begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
9 was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human. For
our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.
10 On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into
heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
11 He will come again in glorv to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will
have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
12 who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is
worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.
13 We believe in the one holy catholic and apostolic church. We acknowledge one
baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
14 We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
15 God’s lever really isn’t a teeter totter, because the fulcrum of God’s lever, the
resurrection of Jesus, was a one time event. It’s not a teeter totter because it will never seesaw back and forth: After he was raised, God’s beam, Jesus, left this creation and ascended
to the right hand of God the Father. Jesus is the only beam strong enough to create a lever
that will move the earth. But Jesus IS coming back. We don’t know when, but on that day
God will exercise his lever one more time. The fulcrum of resurrection and the beam of
Jesus will be combined in the general resurrection, as the Apostle Paul writes:
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“we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last
trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we
will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal
body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability,
and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be
fulfilled:
“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
The resurrection is a big deal because it means that Jesus is who he said he is, and will
do what he said he’d do. Since Jesus defeated death, then by faith in him, so will we. And
since we know that death will not hold us forever, that means we don’t have to be afraid of
death. And since we no longer have to be afraid of death, we are free to live lives of joy and
self-giving love, sharing the good news of repentance and forgiveness of sins to all people.
That’s the good news of the resurrection. That was the good news of Easter two thousand
years ago, and it’s still the good news for us today and tomorrow.
Buffalo United Methodist Church
…serving people for Jesus Christ so that we all may know joy!
609 8th Street NW
Buffalo, MN 55313
763-682-3538
Bill Reinhart, Pastor
[email protected]
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